Tree Pipit | Anthus trivialis

Voice

The song is one of the loudest in the spring woodland edge, and it is recognised by its ending. It opens loud, clear and canary-like: a series of ringing, accelerating tseet-tseet-tseet notes and rolling trills, carrying right across a heath. Then comes the character: five to ten slow, drawn-out, descending notes — see-a … see-a … see-a … see-a — delivered as the bird floats down from the top of its climb on raised wings and spread tail, landing back on a treetop. No other bird in the region combines a loud, fast opening with a slowing, spun-out close. The song flight almost always starts and finishes on a perch; sung from the ground and landing on the ground, it will be a Meadow Pipit. The call is a single hoarse buzzing note, bzeet, with a distinctly rasping, almost electric quality, given on flushing and by migrants passing overhead. In late August and September that note, high over a coastal watchpoint, is often all you get of a Tree Pipit.

Identification

A little larger and more solid than Meadow Pipit at 15–16 cm, and warmer in tone: olive-buff to yellowish-brown above with vaguer streaking, and creamy yellow across the breast fading to white on the belly. The decisive character is the pattern of the streaking: the breast carries heavy, broad black streaks, but on the flanks they become abruptly much finer and thinner, so that in profile the underparts read in two parts — boldly marked above, finely pencilled at the side. The bill is clearly stouter than a Meadow Pipit's, with a pink base. The legs are pale flesh, and the hindclaw is short and curved, shorter than the hind toe — the exact opposite of Meadow Pipit, and the one structural feature that always works on a photograph. The face is better marked: a pale supercilium broadening behind the eye, a dark eye-stripe, and a pale spot on the rear ear-coverts with a small dark spot just below it. The wing shows two rows of coverts with dark centres and broad buff tips, forming a clear double bar. It walks steadily and horizontally, gently pumping the tail, and when disturbed almost always goes up into a tree — which Meadow Pipit does not.

Confusion species

Everything turns on Meadow Pipit, and the shortest answer is: listen. Tree Pipit calls once, loud and hoarse, a buzzing bzeet with a rasping edge; Meadow Pipit calls thin and high and repeats it, two to four stuttered notes in a row. If you can see the bird, check the flanks (finely against heavily streaked), the bill (stouter), the hindclaw (short and curved) and where it lands (a branch). The breast is also a warmer yellow-buff, where Meadow Pipit is colder and whiter. Olive-Backed Pipit, an annual autumn scarcity on the North Sea coasts, is the second candidate and is described next; the difference is the olive-green, almost unstreaked mantle and the sharply drawn spot on the rear ear-coverts. Red-Throated Pipit has a streaked rump and blacker, heavier flank streaks. Rock and Water Pipits are bigger, colder and dark-legged. Tawny Pipit is clearly bigger, paler, longer-legged and clean-breasted — except as a juvenile, when leg length is the better guide.

Habitat

Transitions between woodland and open ground, and that is more precise than it sounds: the bird needs bare ground to nest and feed on, a field layer to disappear into, and tall isolated song posts. In practice that means heathland with scattered birch and self-sown pine, clearfells and young plantations, firebreaks and woodland edges, open conifer woods with plenty of bilberry, birch woods in the north, traditional orchards and scrubby limestone grassland in the uplands, and verges along forest tracks. As soon as the canopy closes or the last trees go, the bird goes. The nest is on the ground in a tussock or under a bilberry clump, well hidden.

Range and movements

Breeds from the British Isles and northern Iberia to central Siberia, and from northern Scandinavia south into the mountains of southern Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus — one of the most widely distributed songbirds of the continent. Every bird winters in sub-Saharan Africa. In north-west Europe it is a bird of heath, inland dune and young plantation with scattered trees: around the southern North Sea on the higher sandy soils and in the dunes, much reduced but holding on where heath and drifting sand are kept open; in the British Isles now chiefly in the north and west, as far as the Scottish Highlands, and almost lost from the heaths of the south and east. Around the Mediterranean a breeder of the mountains — the Pyrenees, the Cantabrian range, the Iberian and Central systems, occasionally northern Andalusia — and otherwise a very numerous passage migrant in April and from late August to early October, when central European and Scandinavian birds turn up anywhere, in dehesa, olive groves and coastal gardens, almost always picked up on call.

• Breeding (summer)
• Passage
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

How and when to look

The last two weeks of April and the whole of May, in the mountains into June, on a heath with scattered birch and pine in north-west Europe, a birch and bracken hillside in the west or north of the British Isles, or an open pinewood in the Pyrenees or the Sierra de Gredos. Find the tallest crown on the slope and wait — the song flight follows of its own accord. Watch deliberately where the bird lands, because that is the difference from Meadow Pipit that actually stays with you. For the call, take a coastal watchpoint or a migration site in the second half of August and the first half of September: they go over high and early in the morning, and the single buzzing bzeet among the stuttering Meadow Pipits is exactly the contrast you need.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened (LC), with a very large range from the British Isles to Siberia and a population in the tens of millions. In north-west Europe the picture is more mixed: it has fallen sharply as open woodland and heath edges grew over and disappeared, and in the British Isles it has all but vanished from the south-east, probably through a combination of changing woodland management and problems on the migration route and in the African wintering grounds. Where sod-cutting and grazing take place and clearfells and firebreaks are kept open, it holds on. In central and eastern Europe and in Scandinavia it is still common and numerous.

Scientific name

Anthus trivialis | (Linnaeus, 1758)

Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Alauda trivialis; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Anthus was introduced in 1805 by Bechstein. Anthus is the Latin word for a small bird of grasslands mentioned by Pliny the Elder. trivialis is Latin for 'common, ordinary', from trivium 'public street'. The specimen the first description was based on came from Sweden.